All wisdom begins in wonder, and this delight kindles a desire for truth that leads us on a quest for the really real -- the source of being itself. Hence, the philosophical impulse, albeit often manifested in atheistic and irreverent stumblings in the dark of human ignorance, begins and ultimately ends in theology -- communicating and communing with our origin and goal. We men are rational animals who seek to know. We are agents of truth who want correct answers to questions that we must ask. From the noblest objects of contemplation to the seemingly insignificant everyday trivialities of life, we attempt to unravel perplexing knots. Limited, blind, and distracted, we nevertheless struggle for wisdom. This is our lot, and it is also our glory.

Tuesday, July 26, A.D. 2011

Breivik a Monster?

Yesterday, I wrote about the futility of worrying about Anders Breivik’s besmirching contemporary conservative causes in “One of Us?” Commentary from the entire political spectrum has condemned Breivik as a monster, and I want to examine that charge. Is the Norwegian killer a monster?

Leftists generally do not have the right to accuse anyone of being a monster, having dismissed, as they have, morality and ethical principles. When the nihilistic Left criticizes anyone in moral terms, one must ask if their ethical worrying is simply an attempt to manipulate the masses who maintain some sense of moral reasoning. Are pleas to consider ethics simply persuasive rhetoric for them? Of course, there are Leftists who have not abandoned the ethical tradition, but I have often experienced moral outrage by relativists who at other times in their freethinking eschew any sense of right or wrong. Maybe, their inconsistency is not in bad faith; perhaps, they are just contradictory. Ad hoc emotionalism does appear to be the guiding light for many leftist wayfarers.

Even among Leftists who do maintain some sense of morality, I have noticed a tendency to excuse wrong doing by transferring guilt to the “system” or culture at large. As I wrote yesterday, Leftists go to great lengths to excuse Mohammedan terrorists by attributing blame to Western bigotry, insensitivity, or inhospitality. Should we expect the empathetic, Scandinavian Leftists to exonerate Breivik’s murder by pointing to the social stresses that large-scale third world immigration has induced in the indigenous Norwegian population? Will they expiate his guilt on the hallowed altar of multiculturalism? As diversity giveth; so diversity taketh away. Certainly, they must dedicate themselves to understanding the killer. They must surely see how the ignominy and pain at watching his own nation disappear before his eyes triggered his lashing out at the entrenched, oppressive powers—the elite, in their multicultural privilege, who bask in universalist self-righteousness but cushion themselves from the unpleasantries of population displacement. Perhaps, the Norwegian government could establish institutions for dialogue between the state’s officials and the dispossessed Norwegians who feel marginalized by the cultural transformation of the past few decades. Maybe, they could even work a critical examination of Scandinavians’ self chosen genocide into the educational curriculum.

Such is how the Left deals with perpetrators of terror when they are Mohammedans, Africans, or members of some aggrieved “Other.” Will Norwegian Leftists show the same sort of apologetic cottoning with the rightwing terrorist? The Scandinavians have been so thoroughly corrupted by liberalism, they might just do so. Perhaps, excusing the “Other” has less to do with anti-white, anti-Western resentment and more to do with the nonjudgmentalism and moral agnosticism that develop deep within liberalism. I do suspect otherwise. Leftist tolerance of malefaction may be due to fear.

As I noted yesterday, Leftists repeatedly absolve Mohammedans, Hispanics, blacks, and leftwing radicals of wicked deeds. With the latter groups, the explanation might be tribal. The Left overlooks the beam in its own eye as well as exonerating the misdeeds of groups that empower the Left. Yet, in what sense do Mohammedans serve Western Leftists? Why would British feminists excuse honor killings and female genital mutilation in London? Why would West Coast homosexualists support increased immigration from societies that stone homosexuals? Why would American Jews make excuses for Hamas and Hezbollah? Do Leftists hate the white West more than they love themselves and their own causes? Perhaps, but I wonder whether democratic cowardice lies behind these appeasements.

Democratic societies throughout history tend to aim for the lowest desires—that of the lowest common denominator—which politically translates into the quest for material comfort. A society that seeks mammon is not usually successful at cultivating courage in its citizens. For courage demands the sacrifice of material comfort and, occasionally, even of life. Commercial liberal republics thrive economically but likewise suffer the stifling of the citizenry’s thumotic reflexes. Americans appear to have bucked this trend for some time, but our greed has probably made enough of us craven to the extent that we would shirk from any real sacrifices as a society. Could the present American populace win the Second World War? I wonder. Appeasement toward “evil doers” might originate in the consequent cowardice; Leftists might think, rather foolishly, that giving in to bullies will mollify them. Thus, the Left makes excuses for those whom it fears.

The Left does not fear conservatives. For all the rhetoric of the white enemy within, our government, media, and educational elite know that they have vanquished traditionalists in every fight and in every realm. Momentary political setbacks are simply delays in the inevitable progressive march of Hegelian history. When the hagged harridan in charge of Homeland Security expresses worry of homegrown, white supremacists, we hear the same disingenuity of the Hollywood loudmouths who worried about Republican and theocratic repression during the Bush years. If those weasels were truly worried about rightwing American oppression, then they would not have been so obnoxious and openly traitorous. Their nonsense was transparently dishonest. They would have otherwise fled to Canada, or they would have ended up in the slammer or “disappeared” faster than an inconvenient Clinton administration official.

The Left’s fear of the conquered Right is therefore falsely affected. The Alinskyites know that the bourgeois Right is too focused on law, order, and holding the social fabric together as the Left tries to rip it apart. They know that the morality, patriotism, and familial dedication of conservatives force them to play by gentlemanly rules while the Left finds itself free to cause whatever chaos and strife that will garner it more power. This will not last, however. Given the forthcoming social breakdown in Western societies, we should expect more rightwing terrorists like Breivik. As civilization crumbles, the Right will be less and less convinced that pouring buckets from a sinking ship is a good idea. The Right’s energy will not go into keeping the wreck afloat but in securing life rafts for its communities. Once the Right comes to grips with the civil war that has been foisted upon them, they will start to think in terms of war. Such martial reasoning has not historically been very appreciative of the value of human life, especially in pre- and post-Christian societies where the light of the gospel is unknown or faded, and then Leftist rhetoric about rightwing danger will finally match reality. How, then, will Leftists respond? The Weimar Republic gives us a precedent.

It will be an ugly catastrophe, but I do not see how we can avert the disaster, barring some miraculous cultural rebirth. For generations, Leftists have sought the transvaluation of all values. Their ceaseless attacks on morality have produced a generation that casually accepts consequentialist ethics, if any ethical system at all. Breivik evidently wrote that he considered his planned actions atrocious but necessary. Therein, we see the inverted moral reasoning of our age—a reasoning that, moreover, quickly surfaces in men’s minds during war. If Breivik’s murders of young Norwegian socialists lead to the revolution that will save Europe, then one hundred lives seem like a small price to pay according to our modern moral calculus. For the Jacobins judged liberté, égalité, fraternité worth thousands of aristocratic heads. Likewise, Sherman did not seem to have many qualms with his scorched earth, total war tactics to hasten Union victory. Marxists weighed the proletariat paradise of the future worth millions upon millions of necessary sacrifices. Éamon de Valera did not hesitate much to build an Irish Republic on the foundation of violence. The Allies found burning Dresden’s residents and carpet bombing German civilians acceptable during war. Truman did not apologize for his decision to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a mass murderer, but he killed in the name of la revolución, and his image remains a staple of leftist chic to this day—a hero to millions. More recently and closer to home, half our citizens find infanticide justifiable for matters of personal convenience. Utilitarianism is everywhere, and it supplied the moral framework to Breivik’s decision. If he is a monster, then contemporary Western societies are full of monsters, and they revere many such monsters as heroes. Far be it from me to exculpate Breivik in the typical leftist manner. His moral reasoning is flawed, like the society that produced him. Yet, his decision to act against the destruction of his people is one that I cannot criticize; it is his methods that warrant condemnation. Conservatives who criticize him must ask how they can fight back in a civil war without destroying their souls. For wars are inherently evil, even if they must be fought.

Leftists have waged relentless internal wars against Western regimes, transforming Western societies into perverse shadows of their former order. Conservatives, for the most part, have refused to call their foes what they really are, pretending, instead, that they dealt with well intentioned political opponents who disagreed over matters of policy. And they have lost, their victories’ being mere tactical retreats in the war that they never recognized. Gramsci has won from the grave; the destruction rolls along. Yet, it cannot continue. Nature always has her way, and social ruin will lead to, well, ruin. At some point, the guards of the citadel will realize that the tower has already been taken by the barbarians, and they will alter their strategic position. The resulting collapse is not something that I wish to witness. Despite the pain, however, it will be good to see the perfidity of the postmodern, nihilistic world engulfed in flames. If we must find ourselves in a battle, let us pray that we comport ourselves with honor and according to God’s immutable laws. Let us also hope that the survivors of the holocaust retain what they can of our civilization’s beauty, wisdom, and grandeur in order to rebuild the West on the ashes.

On Saturday, conservative web sites expressed a collective groan after learning about the Utoya Island massacre, akin to the dismay that American Jews felt when the Bernard Madoff scandal broke. Minority groups that feel themselves to be unpopular and persecuted often concern themselves with the bad actions of a wayward tribesman, fearing that the pitchforked masses might get riled up enough to start a pogrom. In the West, it is not the masses that conservatives fear but rather the elite stationed in government and media positions that will use any excuse to silence and to intimidate their political enemies. You know, the folks who never want a crisis to go to waste. We witnessed this maneuver recently after the Tucson shooting, especially in the noxious attacks on the tea partiers. I wrote about the sordid reaction in “The Madness”:

Let me simply say how troubled I am by the public reaction. It is not that the wicked deed itself is not disturbing, but I acknowledge evil as a painful yet constant fact in our fallen world. The reaction, however, indicates something peculiar about our contemporary society. It is as if America today were Kosovo—a divided land with mutually antagonistic ethnic groups that interpret every passing event through the distorting lens of hatred. Yet, this division does not lie along America’s racial fault lines but rather along ideological ones. This past decade has offered so many of these moments that I have lost confidence that the American regime will outlast my generation’s lifetime. That is a radical statement, and perhaps I would think differently had I seen the madness of the Sixties’ cultural revolution. Yet, I think that the great unraveling is still ongoing, and the dissolution of our society will be the consequence. I hope that I am wrong, but I do not see how the United States can survive.

Many conservatives fear that the Norway killer Anders Breivik will make it easier for Leftists to paint rightwingers as dangerous. What they forget is that the ideological Left will manipulate any story or event to their advantage. Had the perpetrator been yet another Mohammedan, in a very, very long line of jihadist terrorists, then the Left would still have laid the blame on Westerners. It does not matter what happens; for the Left, the blame always falls to whites, Europeans, Americans, Australians, Christians, Jews, the middle class, Republicans, tea partiers, or whichever group is their objet de haine du jour. If Leftists cannot pin an atrocity on the Right directly, then they excuse the violence of the Other by attributing causation to Western bigotry or to the lack of accommodation and understanding of the aliens that the Left has imported into our midst. Reflect upon the global violence that occurred after the Danish cartoons. Leftists did not blame the riots, violence, and murders on savage third world tendencies. They did not trace the mayhem to the essence of Mohammedanism as clearly instructed in its sacred texts. Rather, they attacked the insensitivity of Western cartoonists and their failure to embrace multiculturalism. Consider Timothy McVeigh, whom the Left has used for the past sixteen years as their poster child for the “extreme right.” Scores of leftwing organizations have waged terror on American soil for generations, and yet we must not question the patriotism of Democrats who keep friends like Bill Ayers or wonder why people like him have positions at prestigious universities instead of rotting in prison. Jihadist organizations have attempted (and occasionally succeeded) to kill Americans at home and abroad for decades, in addition to creating havoc around the world, and yet Western apologies and self debasement are the mainstay of political and academic engagement with Mohammedans. Think about the organized crime of the Latin American drug cartels that have brought the nations to our south to their knees and how their encroachment into hispanicized America has rendered portions of our country war zones. Yet, the authorities hesitate to bring law and order to the “shadows” of colonized America because they fear the rhetoric of La Raza race hustlers. Note the reticence and paralysis of our government authorities and media institutions regarding the incessant criminal warfare of the black underclass toward white Americans—what Lawrence Auster calls the low-level black intifada.

Despite the overwhelming numbers that indicate where threats to national security and domestic tranquility originate, our anti-white, traitorous government continues to use a small handful of characters like Timothy McVeigh and the few abortionist assassins to paint traditional Americans as the real enemy within. Conservatives fret in vain over the Left’s addition of another blond public threat. In his absence, the Left could always conjure up another Emmanuel Goldstein or recycle McVeigh ad vitam aeternam. Examine the statements and records of such thoughtful federal officers as Janet Reno, Eric Holder, and Janet Napolitano to see how disconnected from reality Leftists are. For the most recent dose of their idiocy, watch the latest terrorism video of the Department of Homeland Security. These are the same people who pervert statistics to lessen Hispanic crime and to increase white crime by categoring Hispanic criminals as white, though the vibrant newcomers to our national diversity are counted as their own group in matters of affirmative action, disparate impact cases, and other opportunities for the racial Marxists to commit injustice against white Americans. The dishonesty thereby minimizes, to the extent possible, the gulf between rates of black and white criminality.

Truth matters not to Leftists; it is all about power and strategies to increase power for them. Conservatives should not worry about maintaining a clean p.r. image; it is hopeless when Leftists will do anything to crush their enemies and when they control the main organs of public information. Rather, the sane voices of the Right should fearlessly continue to present our indictments of Leftist ideas and policies that are destroying our civilization.

Andrew Marantz has a fascinating story in Mother Jones: “My Summer at an Indian Call Center.” Marantz gives us a glimpse of the life at the other end of the line, where the accents betray M.T.I. (“mother tongue influence”). He also relays the Indians’ perceptions of the Westerners to whom they provide service.

Stephen Sweeney, the president of the New Jersey Senate, was a bit under the weather while criticizing Governor Chris Christie in the following interview:

My favorite comment to the Politico story: “G-d doesn’t like ugly.” Before she died, one of my aunts would chastise folks caught in spits of meanness by saying, in her thick Virginian drawl, “That’s ugly, and God don’t like ugly.” No, God sure don’t.

Last month, netizens were surprised to find that some high profile women bloggers were actually men. A Syrian lesbian dissident and an American lesbian activist have come out of the closet as married white men of a decidely leftward socio-political orientation. Poor white leftist men—they have fully internalized the anti-white, man hating venom of their cohorts. We observers get to feast on the endlessly fascinating consequences of their false consciousness. Mark Steyn humorously comments on l’affaire gouine fausse: “Why liberals fell for ‘Muslim lesbian blogger’ hoax” and “Is Every Lesbian Blogger a Middle-Aged Man?” Given this sensational deception in blogdom, online suspicions about the real identities behind the entries have risen. In case anyone wonders, I assure you that I am not a Burmese transgendered lesbian assassin living in Tokyo. Some will obstinately refuse to believe me, but I am telling the truth.

In this atmosphere of doubt, hbd chick asked if there was a Turing test method to find out if an online persona really is of the sex that he or she claims. She discovered that the Stevens Institute of Technology has developed a textual analysis program that determines whether the author is a man or a woman. I was skeptical but quite intrigued. So, I entered the text of one of my recent posts, and the program quickly decided that I was 81.61% male. I then needed to enter a serious woman’s text about a serious issue, thinking that I would baffle the program by offering rational arguments and substanative commentary. Blog entries are ideal candidates for such analysis because they are less formal and more idiomatic expressions; academic writing might be too uniform in style for the program to work. So, I submitted Lydia McGrew’s post, “God’s Limitations,” confident that I had tricked the machine. The sextual analysis took some time, but then the oracle proclaimed that the author was 62.17% female. I was impressed. McGrew is a rational, insightful writer, and yet the program still detected that she was a woman. Amazing! I want to know which textual traits it associates with men and women.

Go ahead and sext something. There are worse ways to waste time on the web. I wonder if the software could pass the G.E.M. Anscombe test.